In recent years the golf world has seen a radical change with regard to acceptable and preferred footwear on golf courses. While metal-spiked shoes used to be preferred nearly unanimously, and were sometimes even required, such shoes are now frequently forbidden. It is currently considered that cleats having one or more plastic, rubberized, synthetic, or composite projections are better for maintaining golf courses in playable condition, and, as such, a wide variety of cleated golf shoes are now available.
Cleats help provide sound footing for the golfer during his swing, as well as when he traverses the course. The particular cleat preferred by a golfer for a round of golf may depend upon, among other things, the type of terrain on the particular course and the weather among other factors. Additionally, a wide variety of cleats are being called for in sports other than golf Football players, for example, may wish to use different cleats depending upon whether they are playing on grass or artificial turf, whether the playing surface is wet or dry, or even depending upon what position they are playing at the time. For example, sometimes having many small projections is preferable while, other times, having fewer, longer projections is better. Obviously, to have access to optimal cleats for all situations would be very costly as it would be necessary to own and keep available a myriad of athletic shoes.
To enhance flexibility, therefore, many athletic shoes are now made with changeable cleats. Examples of such athletic shoes are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,033,211; 5,533,282; and 5,727,340. Such shoes often have internally threaded apertures on their bottoms for receiving external threads from individual cleats. Alternatively, such shoes may have unthreaded recesses nevertheless configured for rotatingly receiving correspondingly shaped insertable cleats such as by way of various cooperating cam or wedge surfaces. For ease of reference, these types of cleats will also be referenced as being threaded into or out from receiving recesses in the bottom of the shoe. In this manner, individual cleats can be rotated into or out of such apertures so that they are replaceable. In order to securely attach the removable cleats so they do not work their way loose from the shoe, however, such cleats generally need to be rotated tightly into their corresponding apertures so that they are not prone to rotate back out of position. To provide for higher torque rotation with golf cleats, for instance, cleats conventionally include two torquing openings, and a two-pronged tool is commonly used for engaging the torquing openings and rotating the cleats into and out of the apertures.
Such conventional two-pronged cleat changing tools have shortcomings. First, not all cleats have torquing openings compatible with all such tools. Second, even when compatible torquing openings are present, such as with most golf cleats, they typically get obstructed by dirt, mud and/or other debris which limit the ability of a user to properly register one or both of the prongs of the conventional tool in the torque openings in the cleat so that secure engagement between the tool and cleat is not achieved. As is apparent, this makes it very difficult to obtain the proper amount of torquing action for removing tightly installed cleats from the shoe.
Torquing openings can be less than fully accessible for a variety of reasons. As stated, it is very common for there to be dirt, sand, sod or other earthly material wedged into the torquing openings. Other times, the walls of the torquing openings have been partially or fully eroded away, either from normal usage wear or from wear attributable to prior uses of a conventional two-pronged tool. Thus, conventional two-pronged tools are often unable to effectively change such cleats.
With respect to golf cleats particularly, due to the switch to modem cleats which tend to wear more quickly than their all-metal predecessors, the need for golf cleat change-outs has increased dramatically in recent years. Typically, a clubhouse employee is performing these change-out operations for multiple pairs of golf shoes. Also, there are golfers who request such cleat change-outs when they arrive at the course so that the employee only has a short time in which to accomplish this task, such as the time it takes a golfer to check in and pay for his round until the time the golfer gets in a golf cart to go to the first tee or driving range. Thus, the change-out operations need to be done in a time efficient manner.
The person attempting to do the cleat change-outs quickly often loses sight of the need to have the prongs of the tool inserted as close to full depth in the torque openings as possible to insure that the tool does not slip off the cleat as the tool is rotated. This slip off problem is exacerbated due to the aforedescribed problem of fouling of the torque openings. Because the person typically directs a downward force on the tool toward the bottom of the shoe while rotating/torquing the tool, if one or both prongs slip out from the torquing opening(s), his hand is likely to engage the cleats in place on the shoe with some force, causing injury and slowing down the entire cleat change-out operation. On the other hand, requiring a worker to clean out the torquing openings on all the cleats and to carefully make sure the prongs are fully registered therein is not practical from a speed of change-out standpoint, and, as a result, does not usually occur.
Accordingly, there is a need for a tool that can perform change-out operations on removable cleats of an athletic shoe in a fast and safe manner. More particularly, a tool that allows a golf cleat to be rapidly replaced despite fouling of the torquing openings thereof would be desirable.